I am not usually this self-absorbed. Wait, we need to amend that: I update this stupid personal page every damn day. I am not usually this self-absorbed in the hair realm. But I feel I must tell you about the fiasco that was my haircut. My regular man had cancelled, so the haircut place ("salon" just seems like entirely too fancy a word for an establishment that routinely offers me a can of Budweiser to sip while in the haircutting chair) called and offered me a choice of either rescheduling or keeping the appointment with a different haircut person. My week is all booked up already, as is the following one, so I went with option number two. I arrive for my appointment with Cynthia, who is this giant, muscled, multiply-pierced amazon with John Lydon hair and an incongruous squeaky little cartoon voice. She asks me a few hair-related questions, does not offer me a can of Budweiser (strike one), and begins her haircutting routine. Does everyone remember the Monty Python sketch about the barber who was afraid to cut hair? It was kind of like that. She was very into combing, and sectioning, and combing, and sectioning, and looking at my head from all angles, and then she'd lean in really close and take the tiniest snip with the scissors. Then she sprayed some greasy crap all over my hair, and blew it dry all bendy and strange and flipped up at the ends like some grotesque cutesy Mouseketeer, and the minute I got home I jumped in the shower to fix things myself. Yuck.

THINGS YOU MAY NOT HAVE KNOWN ABOUT ME AND IT EASILY COULD HAVE STAYED THAT WAY

On the one hand, I hate car alarms. On the other hand, I like to sing along. Especially on the cyclic ones. That almost-octave at the end is a real vocal workout.

I have never been able to thread a needle.

Whenever I fly alone I always size up the person next to me for hand-holding potential should we start to crash. I don't want to sit next to any lone wolves who are just going to cry or pray by themselves, damn it. ("Sir, you are seated in a snuggly row. In the event of an emergency, you will be expected to snuggle. Please let a flight attendant know if you wish to be re-seated.")

As I really should try to explain to someone in greater crazy detail, it is not so much my neck/shoulders that hurt all the time but rather my skull muscles. Do people have skull muscles? Or whatever holds the back of my head onto my neck. That is mostly from whence the Bad Feelings come. And of course the wrists. My wrists ache a lot because I have had lots of hand- and wrist-related trauma in my life and sometimes I actually feel all sad for my poor stupid hands. Like I want to light a candle for them or something.

Childhood Thing A, which I had almost forgotten until someone started mentioning the conga drums to me: When I was a kid I had a fever hallucination of a frog playing the conga drums and singing "boom shaka laka laka boom shaka laka laka." I think the frog may also have been wearing a sombrero. The image has stayed with me.

Childhood Thing B: I made a couple of radio commercials when I was around seven years old (we had a family friend in the voiceover business). The only lines I remember from any of them are "Where are we going, Daddy?" and "Oh boy, pizza!" To this day I am a total whore for microphones, tape recorders, intercoms, bullhorns.

Childhood Thing C: At around the same age I developed a rather autistic-type obsession with the movie musical On The Town. I can still sing all the songs and do most of the dialogue. It's a little creepy, really.

MAYBE SOME LINKS AFTER ALL THIS LOGORRHEA

Dude, you've got to be kidding. I was mostly writing dark angsty poems during chemistry class.

Some wonderful person sent me this in the mail. These days it's mostly Kantian kisses for me.